


Fireworks

by DiscontentedWinter



Series: Holidays with Steter [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: First Time, Good Peter Hale, Loss of Virginity, M/M, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 13:22:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4836857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New Year's Eve is full of drunken idiots and Peter hates everything about it. </p><p>Except for Stiles. Peter doesn't hate Stiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fireworks

 

 

Peter hates New Year’s Eve.

Too many idiots.

Loud, drunken idiots.

And all that kissing.

If one more tipsy woman asks him, with a leer and a wink, where he’s going to be at midnight, Peter is going to snap. Why Talia has insisted on dragging the entire family to the Beacon Hills Memorial Park for this monumental waste of time is beyond him. He has a paper he should have been writing, and what has he done instead? Spent twenty-five minutes waiting in line for a overpriced hotdog, had some kid spill a soda on his favorite shoes, been offered dope by a spotty teen with greasy hair and a Metallica t-shirt, and seen his former high school English teacher, Mrs. Harper, trip over her high heels and face plant into a family on a picnic blanket.

Okay, so that last one was kind of worth it.

But still, Peter would rather have stayed at home. Stayed home, or at least gone to a club or something and seen the New Year in with a literal bang, but no, Talia insisted this was going to become a family tradition. Peter wonders if she’ll still feel the same when she discovers Cassie, their cousin’s toddler, has thrown up in her purse.

Peter really wants to be there to see the look on her face for that, but at the moment he’s skulking at the edge of the park. There are still twenty minutes to go until the midnight fireworks. When Peter had left the family, most of the Hale kids were already asleep or, in Laura’s case, snuck away to be with her grubby little boyfriend. Or, in Derek’s case, was sitting with a blanket pulled up around his ears glowering at everyone and complaining that he wanted to go home.

Peter couldn’t blame him.

Of course, he also couldn’t bear be around him, so off he’d skulked. Out of the floodlights, and away from the awful band, and the loud rides, and the food stalls, and all those _people_. Apparently the entire population of Beacon Hills has turned out tonight for the town’s pathetic idea of how to throw a party.

Peter walks a little further into the gloom. If he didn’t have werewolf senses, he’s pretty sure he would have stepped on the kid lying motionless on the ground. He stares down at him. The kid is probably about five or six, and looks vaguely familiar.

Of course. It’s the kid from last Halloween. The one who’d threatened him with a water pistol and demanded all the candy.

Peter narrows his eyes at him.

The kid’s eyes are closed and he isn’t moving. Peter can hear his heartbeat though. Peter looks around. He doesn’t have a paternal bone in his body, but come on, this isn’t good parenting, is it?

“Hey,” he says, and nudges the kid’s ribs with the toe of his shoe.

The kid opens his eyes and glares. “Go away.”

Well, okay then. Peter turns and takes a few steps. Then turns back. “Do your parents know where you are?”

The kid huffs. “No, and they’ll be sorry when they find me here, dead!”

“I think the fact that you’re still talking might give the game away,” Peter says. It’s not like he wants to rain on the kid’s pity parade, but he feels it is a valid point to make.

“I’m only talking because you kicked me,” the kid says.

“I didn’t _kick_ you,” Peter says. “I was checking to make sure you weren’t really dead.”

The kid’s eyes widen. “Did I look dead?”

“Sure,” Peter lies. “You were totally convincing.”

The kid beams, and Peter feels inexplicably pleased to have been the cause of that.

“I don’t want to judge,” Peter tells the kid, totally judging him, “but this seems an odd way to spend your evening. You could stay here and pretend to be dead, or you could go and find your parents before the fireworks.”

The kid looks torn. He chews on his bottom lip for the moment. “I _could_ , but then they wouldn’t feel bad.”

“Well, it’s your choice,” Peter says, and steps away again.

The kid settles back into his corpse position, eyes closed and arms crossed over his chest. Then he turns his head and cracks an eyelid at Peter. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” Peter says.

He leaves the kid lying in the dark. But if he doesn’t move _too_ far away, and if he keeps an eye on him just to make sure he doesn’t meet a different kind of predator in the dark, well, that’s nobody’s business.

And, when the kid’s father finally tracks him down, Peter grins to himself as the frazzled deputy, clearly at the end of his tether, lays down the law and tells the indignant kid he’s grounded _forever_. At least someone’s having a worse night than Peter, right?

 

***

 

The pack decides to meet at Derek’s loft to watch the fireworks at midnight. And then suddenly it’s a party. Peter isn’t invited, of course, but he goes anyway, because he likes to turn up where he isn’t wanted. Besides, how else will he find out how miserable Derek is? Derek hates parties.

Also, Peter wants to see Stiles. It’s been a few days since they texted each other. A few days before that, on Christmas, Peter blew Stiles. Blew his fucking mind as well, even if he does say so himself.

So he turns up at Derek’s loft, only to find that apparently most of Beacon Hills High is there.

Ugh.

Teenagers.

Teenagers who look at him like _hey, there’s someone who can get more beer_.

Peter ignores everyone, and follows Derek’s scent. He finds Derek leaning against a wall and glowering, a soda in his hand.

“Oh dear,” Peter says. “Someone’s not happy.”

Derek growls a little.

“Well, you will let your puppies walk all over you,” Peter says.

“Shut up,” Derek says.

Peter smirks, and then his attention is caught by a familiar scent: Stiles. He turns away from Derek’s death glare, helps himself to a soda from an open cooler, and lifts his nose to chase Stiles’s scent. Stiles smells of body wash, of sugar, of hot sweet blood sharpened with the faint chemical taste of Adderall. He smells of clean skin and apple shampoo, and, underneath it all, of petrichor. He smells of damp loam after rain. It’s a smell Peter has always been drawn to.

He finds Stiles outside on the balcony. He’s alone, leaning on the railing with his hands dangling over the edge.

“Stiles,” Peter says, and takes up a position next to him. He gazes out over Beacon Hills. There’s not a lot to see. It’s Beacon Hills, not Manhatton.

“Hey.” Stiles’s smile is shy and soft.

Peter’s still not used to seeing him like this, quiet and a little vulnerable. He suspects this is a side of himself that Stiles doesn’t often show, and Peter feels strangely privileged to see it. He shifts a little closer, and passes Stiles the soda. “Hey.”

Stiles’s mouth quirks in a quick grin. “Thanks.”

They stand in companionable silence for a little while longer.

“Do you ever wonder why we celebrate the new year?” Stiles asks at last, his brow furrowing. “And I don’t mean ‘we’ as in the human race, I mean we _specifically_. Why, when every new day brings some new exciting monster that wants to rip us all to shreds, why the hell we’re actually excited about tomorrow? Chances are tomorrow will be just like today, except more nightmarish.”

Peter stares out at the night. “I expect it’s because, in cases like ours, it’s much healthier to live in a state of denial.”

“You don’t live in a state of denial,” Stiles says, and his tone sounds half accusatory, half envious.

“No,” Peter says. “And aren’t I a happy camper?”

That pulls a smile out of him.

Peter checks his phone out of habit. It’s eleven-twenty. Forty more minutes of godawful dubstep and screaming drunken teeangers before Peter can tell himself he’s been sociable and seen the New Year in with the pack, with the added bonus of having turned up and annoyed Derek, and now he’s going home and don’t call him again for at least a week unless it’s the apocalypse. Which, given Beacon Hills, is always, sadly, a possibility.

Well, he tells himself he only came to the party to annoy Derek, but maybe it’s more than that. Maybe he wanted to see Stiles again too.

Peter smirks at the sad view. Strange that even in his own mind he couches everything in terms of _maybe_. Turns out he’s never too old and jaded to stop lying to himself. To preserve a little shred of dignity, perhaps, in case Stiles tells him to fuck off.

Stiles doesn’t.

Instead, he reaches his own hand out to where Peter’s is dangling over the rail of the balcony, and twines their fingers together.

It’s nice.

 

***

 

When he was nineteen and away at college, Peter’s roommate was a total party animal. Peter hated him, of course. He was either drunk, or hungover. There was no middle ground. How he retained enough knowledge to scrape passes in his classes, Peter will never know.

 _“Dude, it’s_ college _,”_ Louis said, whenever Peter bitched about how the party noise made it impossible for him to study.

Peter spent a lot of nights in the library, dreaming about creative ways to murder Louis.

His parents had always told him that wolves were social animals.

Peter learned at a very early age that _social_ and _sociable_ did not mean the same thing.

 

***

 

Scott is drunk when he stumbles outside onto the balcony. “Stiles!” he screams excitedly, like he hasn’t seen his best friend in years.

“Hey, buddy,” Stiles says. He lets Scott hug him. “You want to slow down on the beers?”

“It has wolfsbane in it,” Scott announces, in what he thinks is a conspiratorial whisper but is more like shouting it from the mountaintop. “I am _so_ drunk!”

“Yeah, I see that,” Stiles says. “You need me to hold your hair back while you puke in Derek’s toilet?”

Scott seems to consider that for a moment. His expression grows very serious. “Stiles, I have short hair.”

“I know, bro. I know.”

“Ha! You’re funny!”

Peter resists the urge to roll his eyes. Scott is Stiles’s best friend, after all, even though Peter, for the life of him, will never understand why. Stiles is smart and razor sharp, and gloriously sarcastic. All of that is utterly wasted on Scott. And speaking of utterly wasted...

“Dude, you should come and dance with me!” Scott exclaims.

“Sure, Scotty,” Stiles says. “You go in and wait for a good song, then come back and get me, okay?”

“Okay!” Scott wheels around again until he’s more or less facing the door back inside. Stiles prods him gently in the back to get him moving, and then he sways back inside.

“You’re going to  dance?” Peter asks.

Stiles shrugs. “He’s too drunk to remember.”

“Shame,” Peter says. “I would have liked to see that.”

Stiles laughs.

 

***

 

“If you don’t leave the house occasionally, you’re going to end up forever alone,” Talia tells Peter as she herds the kids toward the door.

Frankly, listening to the assorted squealing and whining and shrieking of the bunch of little brats known as his nieces and nephews, Peter would happily take the forever alone option, thanks.

He sighs and closes his book. “Talia, don’t you know you should keep your puppies locked safely inside during fireworks?”

Talia glares at him. “Getting in the fucking car, Peter.”

She never did have a sense of humor. But, also, she’s his alpha.

Peter gets in the fucking car.

 

***

 

Stiles checks the time on his phone. “Thirty minutes.”

“I can hardly wait,” Peter lies dryly.

“Gonna get pretty crowded out here soon,” Stiles says. “Want to go somewhere more private?”

Peter feels warmth expand inside him. “Yes.”

He tries not to feel the weight of any expectations in this, whatever this is.

Stiles has the lead, as always, even if Peter isn’t sure he knows that.

He follows Stiles back inside, through the press and the crush of the partying teenagers, toward the exit to Derek’s loft.

 

***

 

Of all the things he lost in the fire, Peter misses his innocence the most. He’d never thought of himself as innocent. Even as a child he’d always been unsurprised by the cruelty of others. In school, when a bigger kid knocked him down and took his lunch money, Peter wasn’t surprised. He didn’t cry at the injustice of it. He didn’t cry at all, actually. Just calmly and rationally waited for his moment, then unloaded three tubes of stolen paint into Jimmy Madison’s backpack when nobody was looking.

Even as a kid, Peter wasn’t afraid of the dark or anything in it. He’d thought himself equal to it.

Until the fire.

Peter had always prided himself on his deviousness, on his ruthlessness. He might not have been the fastest wolf in the pack, or the strongest, but he was the smartest. He was the most cunning. He didn’t even suspect he had the capacity to feel horror so deep that it rewrote his entire world in an instant and scorched itself onto his bones.

Not until the fire.

Not until the woman he loved was lying dead in the smoke-filled basement.

Not until he could hear his pack choking and dying around him.

Not until he held Matty, his eight-year-old nephew, in his arms as the fire raged around them, and snapped his neck to end his suffering.

Peter hadn’t known he was innocent at all, until the night he burned.

He still has nightmares.

  

***

The roof is empty. Nothing above them but a field of stars. Nothing below them but darkness. From the loft, the music is still pumping out, but it’s strangely muted from up here. Peter thinks he prefers it to silence. Silence is too often stark. The dull thump of the bass reminds him that he’s escaped the noise of the party, sidestepped it, but it remains as a reminder that the rooftop is a sanctuary, not a graveyard.

“Peter.” Stiles takes him by the hand. His face is shrouded in the darkness, but Peter can hear the anxious drumbeat of his heart, in counterpoint to the distant bass. He can feel the warmth of his body as he flushes. “Do you want to fuck me, Peter?”

Coming from anyone else, it might have been teasing. But from Stiles it is undoubtedly an honest question.

“Yes,” Peter says, because an honest question deserves an honest answer. “I do.”

Stiles digs into the pocket of his jeans with his free hand. “I brought lube, but...but you have to—you have to show me what to do.”

Stiles sounds suddenly a lot younger than his sixteen years. If Peter were a better man, it would have been enough to make him step away. But Peter’s not a better man, and Stiles might be young but he’s stubborn. He knows what he wants.

Peter wants it too. He wants to possess Stiles. He wants to be the first man—the _only_ man—to feel the tight heat of Stiles’s body around him, to make him tremble and moan and come crying his name. He wants to shatter him into a million pieces and put him back together again with kisses and soft touches.    

“I’m not going to fuck you on a concrete roof, Stiles,” he says, almost regretfully.

Stiles tugs him around the side of what Peter guesses is the building’s generator. It’s a squat brick structure with rusted warning signs and three different padlocks on the door. Around the other side, up against the bricks, is a mattress and an unzipped sleeping bag.

“You brought a mattress up here?” Peter asks, raising his brows.

“Um, yeah? Last week while you guys were patrolling the Preserve.” Stiles shrugs. “I’m pretty glad it didn’t rain.”

“I really must stop underestimating you,” Peter tells him. “Clearly you know how to plan ahead.”

Stiles huffs out a laugh. “You don’t underestimate me.”

“No,” Peter agrees. “I don’t.”

And then he kisses him.

 

***

 

Talia is pissed when Peter finally wanders back to the family, and he wonders if that’s because she’s discovered the vomit in her handbag or if it’s because Derek is sitting in an angry little huddle with a blanket over his head, refusing to come out.

“I want to go _home_ ,” he says, his voice muffled.

Peter sits down at the edge of the pack and considers telling him that he should try playing dead, because that would apparently make his parents feel really bad. Okay, not like it worked for that weird little kid, but it was a fairly solid plan. It's just the execution that was lacking. 

His gaze rakes over the crowd until he finally spots the kid again. He’s looking surprisingly spry, for a corpse. He’s sitting on the hip of a dark-haired woman, waving a stick of candy floss around.

Right. Because the one thing that kid needs is more sugar.

As Peter watches, the deputy walks over to them. He puts his arm around the woman, and scruffs the kid’s hair.

It looks like everything’s forgiven then.

Peter looks away from them as the countdown starts.

“Derek,” he says, and elbows the unhappy little lump. “You’re going to miss the fireworks.”

Derek doesn’t answer, and Peter doesn’t really care either way. But by the time the first fireworks explode above them in a shower of red and gold, Derek’s peeking out from the blanket.

 

***

 

Peter wonders if Stiles chose the rooftop precisely because it’s dark. It doesn’t stop him from hiding his face in the crook of his arm when Peter finally gets him lying on the mattress and is peeling his jeans down. Stiles shivers as the cold air hits his skin. He shivers in anticipation too, and perhaps fear. Sometimes, Peter knows, want isn’t enough to overcome fear. It can only hijack it for a moment.

Stiles’s body is a revelation. If they were somewhere warmer, Peter would take his time to worship it. Instead, he flings the sleeping bag over both of them, and pulls Stiles into a tight embrace, chaffing his cold hands between his palms until he brings warmth back into him. It’s the work of seconds really, to have Stiles’s body temperature running high again. Stiles’s dick is digging into Peter’s hip by the time he’s finished.

Peter kisses him. He tastes like soda and potato chips. His mouth hot and wet, and he shivers as Peter licks inside it. There is a moment of resistance—Stiles’s nerves again—and then a sweeter moment of submission, when Stiles relaxes into the kiss. Peter breaks it then, despite Stiles’s sweet little moan of disappointment, and licks and kisses his way down his body instead. Stiles’s legs part for him, and he brings his knees up. Peter rewards him with one quick kiss to the leaking tip of his dick, and Stiles gasps and the muscles in his abdomen tighten and jump.

Peter pushes his thighs apart and presses his mouth to his hole.

“P-Peter!” Stiles almost jack knifes off the mattress. His shaking fingers twist in Peter’s hair. “Oh, fuck!”

Peter rewards him with a little lick. “How does that feel?”

Stiles shudders. “Isn’t it gross?”

“I’m not complaining if you aren’t.” Peter licks him again, this time pressing the point of his tongue into the tight furl of muscle. Humans can be strangely squeamish. Peter has the heightened smell of any werewolf. There’s no part of Stiles he hasn’t already smelled, and doesn’t already know. Getting his tongue up his ass isn’t a deal breaker. Stiles tastes like _Stiles_. Musky, earthy, with overtones of spice, of that apple shampoo he’s been using lately, and a faint chemical whiff of Adderall. Frankly, the Adderall is more offensive to Peter’s sensitive nose than any natural scent or taste Stiles produces.

“Oh my god, Peter!” Stiles’s dull fingernails dig into Peter’s scalp, and he squirms and shivers underneath him. “Oh, oh god.”

Peter pushes his tongue deeper inside. There’s something supremely satisfying about being able to do this for Stiles, and it’s not just the ego boost he gets from being skilful enough to give Stiles pleasure. It’s a deeper satisfaction than that. It’s because Stiles trusts him enough to allow him to do this, to open himself to a predator, to a sociopath, to creeperwolf Peter Hale. That trust… well, perhaps there’s something redeemable in Peter after all, because Stiles isn’t naïve. Stiles has never been naïve. He’s too smart to trust easily.

Stiles whines like a pup. “Peter! Peter!” He twists his fingers in Peter’s hair. “ _Do_ something.”

Peter leans up. “Do something? Are you paying no attention at all? I’m a little offended.”

Stiles huffs out a breathless laugh. “I mean, fuck me, please, before I blow!”

Peter grins and reaches for the lube. “Have you ever done this yourself?”

Stiles’s throat clicks as he swallows. “Um, a bit? Like sometimes with a finger. And I ordered this dildo online, but I couldn’t make it fit, so I like wrapped it in three different newspapers and threw it in a trash can two blocks from my house, and I’m still scared my dad will somehow find it.”

Peter laughs. He loves that about Stiles, that he shares his teenage humiliations so freely. It takes a special sort of strength, so rare in anyone let alone teenagers, to take something that should be seen as a source of embarrassment and strip of its power by laying it bare. And Stiles has done it ever since Peter has known him. Peter once heard Derek say that Stiles has no filter. Not true. He just uses it to guard the only truths that really matter.

“We’ll take it slowly,” Peter promises him, drizzling lube onto his fingers. “You can tell me to stop if you want.”

Stiles nods.

Peter leans down and kisses him, and the sleeping bag settles over them again, shutting out all but a few fingers of the cold night air. Peter settles himself beside Stiles, close enough to press kisses to his mouth even while his hand dips back into the cleft of his ass. Stiles shifts nervously, the muscles in his thighs tightening. His breath is warm against Peter’s mouth as Peter presses his index finger gently inside him.

He’s tight and hot, and Peter pushes a little noise of surprise from him.

“Okay?” Peter asks him.

“Yeah.” Stiles shifts again. “Just, um, kind of awkward. I’m pretty glad it’s dark, actually.”

“Hmm.” Peter twists his finger, and a tremor runs through Stiles. He’d love to be doing this in the light, honestly, each touch, each kiss, stripping away another veil of Stiles’s insecurity. How can he not know he’s desirable? “You do realize I can see you perfectly well in the dark?”

Stiles wrinkles his nose. “Oh, thanks for that.”

Peter withdraws his finger, and presses two inside him. “And you look gorgeous.”

Stiles’s expression says he doesn’t believe it, but he relaxes slightly. Peter rewards him by pressing the pads of his fingers over his prostate.

“Oh, Jesus!” Stiles slaps a hand over his mouth as a shudder tears through him.

Peter kisses him on the jaw and scissors his fingers.

He’s beautiful. So beautiful.

Stiles melts slowly under Peter’s attention, legs falling further apart and hips starting to lift with each gentle thrust of Peter’s fingers. Peter opens him slowly, until he’s got three fingers inside him and Stiles is moaning quietly for more, tossing his head from side to side.

“Please, Peter, please.”

The warm air under the sleeping bag is sharp with the scent of Stiles’s precum. Peter’s mouth waters.

“Peter,” Stiles whispers urgently. “Please.”

“I want you to ride me, Stiles,” Peter says, sliding his fingers free, and Stiles widens his eyes. “Will you?”

Stiles nods.

Peter slathers his dick with lube, and rolls onto his back. Stiles is a warm, trembling bundle of limbs. He settles himself astride Peter’s hips.

“I don’t, um…”

“Take your time,” Peter says.

Stiles shifts. He narrows his eyes like he’s working at some complex mathematical problem, then raises himself up onto his knees and shuffles back a little. Peter guides him gently. He takes his aching dick in his hand and positions it so that the tip of it kisses Stiles’s hole.

“Take your time,” he says again.

Stiles braces his hands on Peter’s shoulders and slowly lowers his weight back down. His face is a symphony of emotion: anxiety, desire, discomfort as Peter’s dick breaches him, and, finally, surprise as he seats himself fully.

Peter curls his fingers around his hips. “Okay?”

Stiles squirms. The muscles in his thighs are trembling. “Holy shit. You’re big.”

“You’re gorgeous,” Peter says. He encourages Stiles into a gentle, undulating rhythm.

“Ha! Werewolf strength!” Stiles gasps as Peter lifts him slightly, then thrusts up as he lowers him again. His eyes roll back in his head. “Oh, fuck.”

Stiles’s dick is still hard. Each thrust from Peter causes it to leak more and more precum. Peter’s head swims with the smell of it, and he has to concentrate to keep his claws retracted. His wolf is alert, close to the surface, whining. It wants to scent, to rut, to _bite_ , but Peter’s no unpredictable teenager. He knows how to keep the wolf on its leash. He won’t hurt Stiles. He was a monster once, but not tonight. Not in this moment, with this boy, with the unimaginable, underserved _gift_ that is Stiles. 

Stiles arches his back, and the sleeping bag slips off him and pools somewhere behind them. Stiles is framed in starlight then, his eyes closed, Peter’s name falling from his lips like a sacred litany as he rises up and then slams down again to meet each one of his thrusts. His trembling fingers are splayed on Peter’s chest, and in that moment he feels somehow ephemeral and everlasting at the same time.

He’s framed in starlight.

Then, behind him, the sky lights up with fireworks.

The entire universe does. 

 

***

 

Peter’s leading a sleepy, grumbly Derek toward the parking lot when the deputy approaches him, the weird kid on his hip.

“There!” the kid exclaims. “That’s the man!”

 _Shit_. How is it ever a good thing when a kid points you out to an officer of the law?

“Ask him!” the kid exclaims. “Daddy, ask him!”

Peter tries his hardest to look like an upstanding citizen.

The deputy sighs. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but my son insists that he is now a zombie or a ghost, and—”

“Or the ghost of a zombie,” the kid interjects.

“Or the ghost of a zombie,” the deputy continues, “and apparently you can confirm that he was in fact dead earlier tonight.”

The kid nods eagerly.

“Well,” Peter says, while Derek screws up his face, “I’m no doctor, but yes, I’m pretty sure he was dead.”

The kid beams.

The deputy nods and tips his hat. “Thank you for your time.”

“I told you!” the kid squeals. “I told you!”

The deputy walks away with him.

“That kid is weird,” Derek mutters.

“Shut up, Derek,” Peter says through his unaccountable smile.

Derek kicks him in the shin.

 

***

 

The loft is a mess when Peter finally appears again around dawn. Derek is standing in the middle of a sea of empty cans and snack wrappers, a black trash bag in one hand, wearing the bitch face from hell.

“Hmm,” Peter says, idly kicking a can. “Maybe you should just declare it a natural disaster zone and the government will send the military in to help with the clean up.”

Strangely, that doesn’t appear to improve Derek’s mood.

“You could get another trash bag and actually _help_ ,” Derek mutters.

“I think you’ll find that I put my can in the recycling,” Peter tells him. “This problem here? It is not _my_ problem.”

Derek stoops down to pick up a can. He crushes it in his fist and flings it into the bag.

Peter looks around. “What happened to your little puppies? Shouldn’t they be helping you?”

“Scott only just went to sleep after spending two hours vomiting,” Derek snarls. “Isaac went home with some girl. I have no idea where everyone else is. I haven’t even seen Stiles in hours and—”

“Hey, Derek.”

Peter smirks as Stiles steps inside the loft. Derek glares at him suspiciously, and then at Peter again, and then back at Stiles. And then his eyebrows almost launch into orbit when Stiles slides his arm around Peter’s waist and leans into him.

“You’re—” Derek drops the trash bag with a clatter. “You and Stiles? Jesus Christ, Peter! He’s sixteen!”

“Yes,” Peter agrees mildly. “But we decided that since I’m already a murderer, I wasn’t going to worry about something as minor as statutory.”

“Minor!” Stiles snorts. “Ha! Also, I was totally into it.”

“You were,” Peter agrees.

“Still am,” Stiles says.

Peter grins.

“Welp,” Stiles says, drawing a deep breath. “We’ve love to stay and help you clean up and stuff, but apparently I have to go and get a pancake breakfast with my hot older boyfriend. See you round, Derek.”

Derek gapes at them.

“Bye, Derek,” Peter says, and flashes him a smile.

Then, his arm still around Stiles, they leave the loft together. 

Peter's happy. 

It's a new day, after all. 

Hell, it's a new year. 

And Peter's entitled to a little optimism, isn't he?  

 


End file.
